In Brief: Assassination Porn and the Sickness on the Left
When you send out the message that a mass murderer is about to take power, unless…
As a historian, Victor Davis Hanson just has a way of putting current issues in perspective.
If we were leftists and we were to use leftist tropes to editorialize the recent attempt on Trump’s life, then we would frame the assassination attempt in the following way:
We have witnessed for years blatant exceptions to the once common custom that we don’t normalize the imagined killing of any president or presidential candidate and thus lower the bar of violence.
But the Left constantly makes Trump an exception. Now, it as if the imagined killing of Trump had been mainstreamed and become acceptable in a way inconceivable of other presidents.
(Do we remember the rodeo clown who merely wore an Obama mask during a bull riding contest and was punished by being permanently banned by the Missouri State Fair authorities?)
So since at least 2016 there has been a parlor game among Leftist celebrities and entertainers joking (one hopes), dreaming, imagining, and just talking about the various and graphic ways they would like to assassinate or seriously injure Trump:
By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting ( Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion eating his corpse (Pearl Jam), by suffocating (Larry Whilmore), by blowing him up (Madonna, Moby), by throwing him over a cliff (Rosie O'Donnell), just by generic “killing” him (Johnny Depp, Big Sean), or by martyring him (Reid Hoffman: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”).
Or should we deplore the use of telescopic scope imagery, given that the Left blamed Sarah Palin for once using bullseye spots on an election map of opposition congressional districts, claiming that such usage had incited the mass shooting by Jared Lee Loughner?
Yet, recently POTUS Joe Biden was a little bit more graphic and a lot more literal.
In a widely reported call to hundreds of donors last week, Biden boasted, “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
“In a bullseye?”
He notes that Democrats tried to strip Trump of Secret Service protection entirely before continuing:
if the common referent day after day on the Left is that Trump is another Hitler (cf. a recent The New Republic cover where Trump is literally photoshopped as Hitler), then it seems reckless not to imagine an unhinged or young shootist believing that by taking out somewhat identical to one of the greatest mass murderers in history, he would be applauded for his violence?
So is their logic, shoot Trump and save six million from the gas chambers?
